A SIMPLE PLAN

tl;dr

50 Twitch.tv follows then at least 3 people tuning in per broadcast over 30 days enables monetization.

Compromise

Last time I talked about this whole live broadcasting my videogaming thing I’d gone from a strict schedule of daily streams to a more “do whatever the hell I want” approach. It seems that the sweet spot might exist somewhere between those two extremes, and with a very busy semester of computing science rapidly approaching I’ve come up with what looks like a comfortable fixed schedule (you can hit the “+” in the bottom right to add it to your calendar app if you want):

Sundays is a new-ish show I call “Dark Acre Church” where I go through one round of my Steam Discovery Queue, critically analyzing 12 random games and deciding if they’re worth Wishlisting. Here’s an example from this morning:

The other three broadcasts will be “The Unplayed”, where I spend at least an hour playing a game from my vast library that I’ve never played before. Here’s the last one I did (starts around the 5-minute mark):

We’ll see how long I’m able to stick with this before changing it up again.

Slash Dark Acre Jack

From the outset of this streaming thing I wanted to leverage the existing Dark Acre Digital brand to try and shoehorn whatever scraps of an audience remained from my indie game developer/author days into watching me play videogames. I’ve since decided that as the core feature of the broadcast a) is wholly different from those now-dead careers and b) revolves around me as a personality, it makes more sense to simply point to my personal spaces on the web. I own the /darkacrejack extensions on most URLs that matter (twitter.com, facebook.com, twitch.tv) so it only makes sense to boil the pointers all down to one.

I’ve re-opened my personal Facebook to the public, insofar as allowing random folks I don’t know to “follow” me there and view any posts I mark as “Public”. This means retiring the Dark Acre Digital page, something I should’ve done a couple of years ago. The same thing goes for Twitter. The YouTube channel needs a little transitioning, and I’ll be using a new channel there to archive all the Twitch broadcasts going forward.

Hopefully this simplifies and somewhat personalizes things. If nothing else it’ll mean updating two fewer locations every time I want to announce something livestream-related.

Road to Affiliate

Twitch’s direct monetization requirements as of August ’17.

We’re going to be taking it easy in the coming months, but the real goal is being able to squeeze some passive monies out of the broadcasts. To that end there are really only two things to accomplish with the Twitch.tv channel:

Reach and surpass 50 channel follows.

Have at least 3 people tune in every time over a 30-day period.

The first will happen in the fullness of time, so long as I keep to the schedule and remain consistent. The second will be a little more difficult to pull off, but I think that when it happens it’ll prove the entertainment value I’m providing. If neither of these requirements are met, I guess it’ll mean that either my scheduling sucks, my overall passive marketing is garbage, or no one’s interested in what I’m selling. Let’s give it from now until January ’18 before pulling the plug.

Thanks for checking out this update. Until next time, keep calm and game on.